The relationship between state and society in Algeria has evolved over the past fifty years, moving from seeming symbiosis during the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s, to rupture in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2011, both state and society, perhaps exhausted from the turmoil of the last thirty years, are extraordinarily weak. Society cannot efficiently articulate demands, whereas the state finds it increasingly difficult to implement its own policy on the ground. Indeed, despite close to fifty years of state and society building, contemporary Algeria might be best characterized as having a weak society, a weak state, and a resistant regime. This paper seeks to understand the evolving nature of state-society relations in Algeria. Doing so, it revisits focuses on the heyday of Algerian popular democracy in the 1960s and 1970, the disjuncture of the 1980s and 1990s, and seeks to assess the perspectives for liberal change in light of recent events in Tunisia and Egypt.